Unlikely bestseller who changed the future of the American novel

London-born Jhumpa Lahiri's new collection of short stories went straight to number 1 in the American bestseller lists. Now her tales of immigrant life are being hailed as a new direction in US literature. Edward Helmore reports on a changing of the guard in American fiction

When Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth, went straight to the top of the New York Times fiction list 10 days ago, the US literary establishment added to the already impressive list of accolades and plaudits it has heaped on the 40-year-old Brooklyn author since she published her first collection of short stories in 1999.

Lahiri's new book, both the NYT and Time magazine said, represents a fundamental shift in direction of the American novel. No longer could it be considered under the direction of white, American-born men; the new direction of American letters - allowing for minor adjustments in course by writers such as Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace or Michael Chabon - is now informed by the experience of the immigrant.

A grand statement and one made in good time for the potential arrival of a mixed-race president and safely out of range of the fists of once-belligerent white authors like Norman Mailer.

'Lahiri's rise is part of a changing of the guard in American fiction,' declared Time. This new establishment is one of 'transnationals, writers for whom displacement and dual cultural citizenship aren't a temporary political accident but the status quo'.

The New York Times went further. After Lahiri went to number one. It wrote: 'There are not a lot of surprises, week in and week out, at the upper reaches of the Times fiction bestseller list. But occasionally a comet lands and flattens the forest... it's hard to remember the last genuinely serious, well-written work of fiction - particularly a book of stories - that leapt straight to number one; it's a powerful demonstration of Lahiri's new-found commercial clout.'

So who is this slayer of giants? It turns out that Lahiri is one the mildest, most unassuming authors of the Brooklyn Brownstone set, which includes Nicole Krauss, Jonathan Safran Foer, James Frey and Franzen. Her first book, the story collection Interpreter of Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000. It was followed in 2003 by a novel, The Namesake, which was made into a film by the Indian director Mira Nair. Married to a Greek-American journalist, Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, with whom she has two children, Lahiri is admired for her elegance and her discipline. Lahiri doesn't read her reviews and her Pulitzer remains wrapped up. When she writes she likes to pretend that she never won the prize at all and that her life is as simple as it was before her writing was swept up in acclaim. 'I have to will my world, my life, back to that place, because that's where I find the freedom to write,' she said recently. 'If I stop to think about fans, or bestselling, or not bestselling, or good reviews, or not-good reviews, it just becomes too much. It's like staring at the mirror all day.'

The author, whose parents are Bengali, was born in London before moving to Calcutta, then to the United States. She grew up in Rhode Island, where her father works as a librarian. For years after university, she avoided coming to New York, fearing that she'd be intimated by the literary scene and wouldn't write. Her stories have been embraced in part because they reflect the immigrant experience without the kind of woozy we-are-the-world multi-ethnic liberalism. Her stories, centred on Bengalis who have settled in the Americas and the forces that buffet them, are precisely told.

'Just being brought up by people who didn't and still don't feel fully here, fully present - that's very intense,' she told New York magazine. 'It's not just all about the house we live in and the friends we have right here. There was always a whole other alternative universe to our lives.' Though she was regularly taken on long visits to India, Lahiri has written that she grew up feeling 'intense pressure to be two things, loyal to the old world and fluent in the new'.

In Unaccustomed Earth - which will be published in the UK later this year - eight stories tell different aspects of the immigrant story. In 'Hell Heaven', a teenage girl recounts the friendship of her mother and an amorous family friend; in 'Only Goodness', a sister introduces her brother to alcohol and then later tries to free him of the habit; in 'Nobody's Business', a man falls for his beautiful Indian housemate.

Lahiri says she looks to Tolstoy and Hardy, but her singular influence is William Trevor: 'His words are a balm, unadorned, precise, yet infused with melancholy. I struggle to absorb the measured grace of his sentences, the quietly devastating emotional content of his work.'

Critics detect a Chekhovian sense of loss and melancholy running through Lahiri's work. Her immigrant characters are neither at home in the culture they left, nor in the one they have arrived in. 'Being a foreigner is a sort of lifelong pregnancy - a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts,' she wrote in The Namesake

A New York Times review of Unexpected Earth said her stories were a reminder of her 'appreciation of the wages of time and mortality and her understanding too of the missed connections that plague her husbands and wives, parents and children, lovers and friends'.

Lahiri says: 'There is inherently an elegiac passage that people undertake in coming to a new world, and I write a lot about families, and characters that come from that background. Because I have lived all my life between Boston and New York, I know very little of the life that my parents from Calcutta and their friends have lived. But what I do know is that there is a great loss.'

But can Lahiri's stories - along with those of immigrant authors such as Edwidge Danticat (born in Haiti), Gary Shteyngart (from Russia) and Junot Díaz (the Dominican Republic) - supplant the white male authors who informed US culture throughout the 20th century? In the era of globalisation, are immigrant stories the more compelling, relevant and energetic? Part of the answer lies with the US education system, which is making renewed efforts to make room for authors like Lahiri, Chang-rae Lee and Khaled Hosseini.

Dozens of charities, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, are looking to create new schools with a more global focus. More than 20 states have initiated globalisation programmes or appointed international relations experts to help co-ordinate school curricula.

But there are also voices of caution. 'In some of these trendy schools, there is an ethos that we are all citizens of the world, and that that's all that matters,' says Michael Petrilli of the conservative-leaning Thomas Fordham Institute. 'Students need to be taught to be American citizens first.'

The passage of immigration, warns Lahiri, is not without drawbacks. In the title story, a Bengali-American lawyer repeats her mother's pattern when she leaves her job to follow her husband to a distant city. 'Growing up, her mother's example - moving to a foreign place for the sake of marriage, caring exclusively for children and a household - had served as a warning, a path to avoid...'

If Lahiri believes perfect assimilation is ultimately impossible, she also indicates it may not be a question of location itself but a question of psychic geography. America's latest literary star has managed to turn the unlikely subject of Bengali assimilation into a surprise hit.

What the critics say

'Lahiri's prose here is deceptively simple, its mechanics invisible, as she enters into her characters' innermost journeys... It's a howl from the heart of a writer working at the height of her powers.'

The Los Angeles Times

'Lahiri is, and is not, an old-fashioned writer. She is too natural to be anyone's imitator. Yet the relationship she invites us into can feel familiar from the books we were drawn into when first learning of the good company reading provides.'

The New York Review of Books

'The stories she generates appear true to life, and while a few lack nuance they are never predictable. Lahiri is far too accomplished a writer to relax her gaze.'